Make it Donate

Background

Charities are facing a fundraising crisis and are struggling to modernise. Digital innovation is time consuming and expensive and too much time is wasted on the plumbing rather than the big idea.

Meanwhile, the climate crisis, #metoo, Black Lives Matter and Covid-19 have left people more determined than ever to use their spending power to change the world rather than buy more stuff.

Idea

What if we could turn our everyday actions into simple acts of kindness? What if things like going for a run, doing the shopping, or playing a video game could trigger microdonations for charities? What if simply by living your life you could, over time, transform someone else’s? Pretty much anything on the internet and in our connected lives has an API. APIs let computers speak to each other. Everything except charities, until now.

Make it Donate is that missing API.

Now you can connect what you do for yourself to what you can do for others.

Every time you grab a takeaway you can feed a child in Yemen. Every time you take an Uber, ride your bike, go for a run, pick up the kids from school you can make what you do make a donation.

Results

200 micro donations a day, and over 10,000 donations since launch.

Average user’s monthly donation of £9.

Our Thoughts

This is the sort of brilliant idea Behavioural Economists are going to love. It doesn’t just make giving money to good causes easier, it makes it profoundly satisfying. Every time you do something relatively trivial you can do something meaningful for someone else somewhere else. The long-term needs of the charity (to end poverty, rehabilitate refugees) are married to your short-term needs (to take a cab, get out for a run, enjoy a curry). This is how charities can overcome some of the barriers to giving, which include guilt that you are doing okay when so many others aren’t, and dismay, that their lives are beyond help.